You know I've been watching anime for like 20 years now and have seen all manner of shows and I can say without exaggeration that Baby Steps is my favorite sports anime of all time. It has amazing tension while staying realistic and believable, plus a great cast of characters. Maruo's whole style (being a very deliberate, thoughtful player) is just more interesting to watch than typical shounen I'll-pull-through-with-guts trope.

But I seriously don't know a single person besides myself who actually watches this show. It's kind of low budget with some odd character designs and doesn't seem that popular. And I think that's a real shame. Please somebody out there give it a chance. It does admittedly have a slow start but it's worth it.

About a month ago I was wondering if I'd even be able to pay rent this month. Today I just finished purchasing a brand new fairly high-end car.

The secret sauce that happened in between is that I landed a rather high-paying job. Even so I obviously had to finance the car (the job doesn't pay that well). I shouldn't really have any trouble paying off the loan with what I'm making now but the whole situation still feels a little crazy to me. Incidentally it's my first time ever taking out a loan of this magnitude for anything.

The car is great and I love it but I still feel some nagging voice in my head saying I'm crazy for doing this. Even though I look at the numbers and really it shouldn't even be a problem. There are side benefits to doing this too, since I didn't really have much credit history (not that I have bad credit or anything, I just haven't been borrowing money to begin with so it's hard to judge me) this will go a long way towards building my credit score. I can rationalize things all day though but there's still part of me for which this just feels wrong.

I think I like the idea of Odin Sphere a lot more than the actual game. The art is great and the setup for the game definitely has potential. But the gameplay...argh, even when it was working right it was still a boring repetitive slog. I don't think I could ever go back to Odin Sphere after playing Dragon's Crown. The gameplay is just so much more refined in the latter. It's night and day.

Re:Monster was originally a web novel. I think it has been published (a lot of successful web novels eventually get published), but it was an amateur work originally.

There is a serious problem with web novels like that being nothing more than blatant power fantasies. I actually read a number of Japanese web novels because they're easy to find and it's a decent way to practice my Japanese (and if you find a word you don't know you can copy and paste it to look it up, which is always handy). But I've gotten pretty disgusted with a lot of them. Despite the number of titles out there I feel like there's almost no variety because they all do the exact same shit the exact same way. Ordinary Japanese high school student gets summoned/reincarnated to a fantasy world (possibly with blatant RPG mechanics because reasons), acquires some special power, and abuses the fuck out of it. When you consider that it's probably written by an ordinary Japanese high school student it's hard to see as anything other than escapism.

I think Aeolus's earlier rant actually isn't very applicable to most original LNs. Maybe there are some exceptions but there's also a lot more variety. However I would almost completely agree with it when it comes to web novels. The vast majority of them are terrible.

Which is why it kind of boggles my mind when I go to sites where people comment about these things and I see comments like, "Finally a protagonist who isn't a wimp!" or some shit. Sorry, but OP protagonists are the new norm these days. There's nothing special about them. And these badly-written self-insertion power fantasy stories that everyone is writing demonstrate exactly why OP protagonists are not really very interesting. If they can easily overpower anyone then there's no real conflict.

I guess there's a segment of people who eat this stuff up though, because some of these stories have gotten really popular. But as literature goes it's the lowest level of trash.

(Incidentally I got so fed up with these kind of stories I actually started reading more web novels aimed at female readers and actually enjoy those more. Go figure.)

I assume you're talking about the new Fate/Stay Night anime? I would recommend watching that before Fate/Zero to be honest. Even though Fate/Zero takes place before Fate/Stay Night it was written later (it's a prequel) and kind of spoils some of the big reveals from Fate/Stay Night.

Today I had surgery to have the implants removed because apparently the bone around them was damaged and they weren't stable.

So after years of work (I had to get orthodontics done first because there wasn't enough space for the implants originally) and several thousand dollars (my insurance didn't cover any of this) all I have to show for it is two holes in my mouth and a lot of pain.